MUSIC REVIEW : Lou Reed’s Sad Laments Fail to Score : Concert: Performance in San Diego highlights Reed’s lack of talent as a guitarist and vocalist.

SAN DIEGO —  It took agonizing death to spur Lou Reed into making the best music of his life, and, on Tuesday night at Copley Symphony Hall, only his intermittently affecting treatment of the subject redeemed an otherwise pallid performance before an enthusiastic, half-capacity crowd of 1,400.

The program drew heavily from Reed’s last three albums, an unintentional trilogy of sorts that deals with mortality and decay from different perspectives. “New York” (1989) described the metaphorical death of Reed’s hometown; 1990’s collaborative “Songs for Drella” was Reed’s and John Cale’s examination of art and the life of the artist vis-a-vis their late mentor, Andy Warhol; and the current “Magic and Loss” album purports to explore “the life, death, and resurrection of the spirit.”

Material from those albums was played in reverse order of their release, with the new opus played in its entirety--and in its exact sequence--as the first half of a two-hour show divided by an intermission. Reed’s backup band of guitarist Mike Rathke, bassist Rob Wasserman, and drummer Michael Blair provided competent, very subdued accompaniment in keeping with the spartan production values, contemplative tone, and chic understatement that mark Reed’s latter-day efforts.

Reed has tackled weighty subject matter in the past, but questions of contrivance were raised by his proclivity toward attention-seeking (pretending to shoot heroin during a concert, assuming an androgynous persona during the gay-chic, glam-rock period of the early ‘70s) and a tendency to swim with trendy currents. Armed with marginal musical skills, Reed over the years has produced mediocre work broken only by the occasional fit of genuine inspiration.

The loss of Warhol and the more recent deaths of two friends to cancer, however, seem to have brought the 49-year-old Reed to an artistic Epiphany of sorts. On Tuesday, “A Dream,” the music-and-monologue from “Songs for Drella,” and certain selections from “Magic and Loss” came the closest to being emotionally involving.

The new album’s “Magician,” in which a dying man yearns for release from his affliction, the aptly titled “Dreamin’,” and the dark reverie “Harry’s Circumcision” created an oddly engaging mood of eerie solemnity. Unfortunately, the prevailing mood, if it can be so called, was one of monotony.

The concert’s deficiencies were extensions of Reed’s. He remains, at best, a rudimentary guitarist doomed to maneuvering in simplistic, two-chord structures that make most of his songs sound the same. Indeed, one wonders if Reed has ever entertained a random thought that he didn’t think could be made into “song” by the application of a couple of basic guitar chords.

The ill-equipped Reed nevertheless insists on supplying his own instrumental embellishments. In concert, he pulled stiff, “spontaneous” fills from his electric guitar as if with pliers, but even those jarring moments could not relieve the musical tedium exacerbated by Reed’s awful vocals. Because he can’t carry a tune, Reed rarely attempts either to write or to negotiate an actual melody. On Tuesday, all but a couple of songs were delivered in his patented flat, toneless sing-speak, which is better suited to the coffeehouse than the concert hall.

In the recording studio, the sameness that results from Reed’s de facto minimalism can, with production craft, be detailed into varying shades of gray. In concert, however, Reed’s dutiful accompanists were not able to achieve such gradations. Like the paranoid, apartment-bound urbanites he writes about, Reed’s songs remained prisoners of their utilitarian confines.

The absence of contrasting tonal colors, tempo changes, rhythmic dynamics, and harmonic movement conspired to create a stultifying stasis that was underscored, not relieved, by the show’s crowd-pleasing moments. When he wasn’t coaxing atmospheric string and piano parts from a MIDI guitar, Rathke spent most of his time strumming the elementary patterns of Reed’s songs. On not one, but two occasions, Rathke elicited cheers from the audience merely by strumming harder .

Not surprisingly, Reed encored with older tunes that were sure to receive a hearty welcome, including “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll.” Ordinarily, such up-tempo fare would sound a discordant note after an evening of downbeat music. But Reed’s perfunctory readings of them ended the concert with an uninspired thud that was characteristic of most of his performance.